Finding my niche wasn’t a lack of ideas. It was figuring out which signals actually mattered

I think the part nobody warns you about is how messy finding the right niche actually is. When you’re starting out, everyone says the same thing: talk to customers, study competitors, find an underserved market. All makes sense... but doing all of that alone is exhausting.

For months, I had dozens of tabs open every day, including competitor websites, Reddit threads, customer reviews, YouTube comments, newsletters, product pages. I’d save interesting examples into Notion, highlight customer complaints, collect pricing screenshots, and tell myself I’d “analyze everything later.” But “later” usually meant spending another weekend trying to figure out if I had discovered a real opportunity or just a few loud opinions online.

So I started experimenting with different AI tools to make this process less manual. Claude became my brainstorming partner when I wanted to challenge an idea. Perplexity was useful when I needed quick market overviews with sources. Tools like NotebookLM was helpful when I have a pile of documents and want to understand common themes. And when I started building repeatable workflows, creao can help me combining research, analysis, and output generation.

As a solo founder, the bottleneck is there's more information than we can handle, and the hard part is turning scattered signals into something you can actually act on. But now these AI tools made me spent much less time organizing information and much more time thinking about the actual business decision.